The use of a mold for making products is well known in the fields of manufacturing and automobile industries. One of the sectors in the automobile industry that uses molding processes extensively is the tire manufacturing sector. Tires are manufactured using various molds to obtain a product in a desired way at a large production level.
The molds used in tire manufacturing often have small vent holes of the size of a few hundred microns provided within the molds. The vent holes enable the hot air gases formed, during the molding process, to be released. Over the lifecycle of the mold, the vent holes get clogged with rubber material and start deteriorating the quality of product.
Conventional methods for cleaning the vent holes at regular intervals involve the use of mechanical tools like drilling tools. However, these methods require much human intervention, which can result in human-induced errors such as breakage of small drills in the vent hole, and thus inherently affecting the product while molding. In certain cases, the broken drill may become embedded into the molded tire, rendering the manufactured tire defective and possibly leading to rejection of the entire batch because of a defect in a single tire.